The long-awaited “Kremlin list,” which was published by the US Department of Treasury and which included 210 names of the top Russian officials and businessmen, did not produce the expected bomb shell effect on the Russian elite.

However, just like any hint of a possibility of denouncing your enemies to a powerful “regulator,” it unleashed an avalanche of Stalinist-like denunciations from the so-called liberal opposition in Russia.

As usual, the people from Yabloko party and their likes revealed themselves to be capable of nothing except reporting to their Western sponsors on “nasty oligarchs,” something which prevent the likes of Grigory Yavlinsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza (the Western media’s choices for Russia’s leaders) from coming to power in Russia.

NO PANIC AT THE TOP

Instead of trembling with fear, Russia’s finance minister Anton Siluanov, who was included in the list, said he viewed this situation “philosophically” and planned to continue working as usual, since almost all the other government members were included.

Other officials also found the list somewhat too inclusive. Vice-premier Arkady Dvorkovich, with his liberal reputation and fresh tan from his recent trip to Davos, said the list read like a “Who’s Who in Russia” booklet.

Indeed, everyone who means something in the government, Kremlin administration and Russian Forbes’ rating of the country’s richest citizens, ended up on the list.

Dvorkovich commented:

As a government minister, I just had to be there, otherwise people wouldn’t understand.

Some analysts even thanked the lazy girls and boys from the US Treasury Department for their idiotic list.

First, preparing for the worst, Russia has made some important changes since last summer;

Second, the list is an almost copy-paste plagiarism of the rating of Russia’s most influential people from Russian dailies and the conspicuous absence in it of the powerful Anatoly Chubais and Elvira Nabiullina immediately marked them out as the persons whom the US views as their preferred candidates for getting more power.

THE LIST AS AN INCENTIVE

This list had been expected in Russia since August last year, and it helped us correct some of our past mistakes. For example, last year the Central Bank published information on the Russian banks that credited our defense industry. Fearing sanctions, Alfa Bank’s owners publicly stopped crediting this sphere, obviously trying to avoid being included in the list. So, now all information on loans for defense industry is classified, as it should be. The decision has been taken to entrust one powerful bank with doing this job.

Thus Andrei Sidorov, the head of the Department of Global Processes at Moscow State University (MGU) explained Russia’s reaction to the list. He went on to say the following

Besides, when [Americans] add to the black list the heads of Russia’s main companies, such as Lukoil and Sberbank, they help the Russian government “nationalize” the heads of these companies and move the companies’ assets back the country. The reason is simple: it becomes dangerous to keep money abroad.

The law obliged the US government to provide “a list of senior political figures and oligarchs” as determined by “their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth” (you had to own no less than $1 billion to qualify for the list).

The US authorities were expected to find out the sources of income of the list’s members and their relatives – and to report this information to Congress so that the US would have it on hand in order to put pressure on Moscow, thus reducing Russia’s capabilities for “aggression.”

The idea of the Treasury Department’s list is to fight against these mythical “aggressions” by the trusted method of Hitler and Stalin: by hitting at the enemy’s children and parents, their freedom and property.

THANK YOU, FRIENDLY FIRE

It was not immediately clear how the “victims” of Russia’s potential “aggressions” could benefit from inclusion on the list of Mikhail Fedotov, the ultra-liberal chairman of Russia’s Council on Human Rights, who over the last five years has defended just about every Western agent working in Russian based Western NGOs, and every “artiste” specialising in anti-Putin and anti-Russia insults.

But thank you, Treasury Department, for including this truly powerful and truly cruel man (Fedotov has never defended poor people, preferring to concentrate on defending people like Khodorkovsky) by putting him on your list.

We understand it was a case of “friendly fire,” but thank you anyway!

The other “achievement” of the idiot boys and girls from the Treasury Department is that their list has brought together some of the members of Russia’s elite who are known to be antagonists.

So, instead of antagonising, the list reconciles, melding the Russian elite together by showing them the common threat: the US government’s dangerous inadequacy.

For example, the list includes both Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin and his longtime opponent Vladimir Yevtushenkov, the owner of Sistema investment company.

These strange bedfellows found themselves next to each other in the list of oligarchs to be watched, even though the Western press loves to write about the “evil patriot” Sechin suing in courts the nice liberal Yevtushenkov, presenting the latter billionaire as a victim of the “regime.”

LIBERALS’ LUST FOR REVENGE

The other moment of truth about the list is the avalanche of “denunciation initiatives” from the so called Russian liberals, including journalists.

Leonid Bershidsky, the founder of the ultraliberal, pro-Western Moscow-based Vedomosti daily, who is now residing abroad, suggested via his article on Bloomberg’s Internet site some additional candidates for the bill. These candidates included a Russian businessman who bought RBC – a formerly virulently anti-Russian media outlet where a lot of Bershidsky’s former “students” in journalism continue to work.

Thus Mr. Bershidsky is ready to sacrifice the financial stability of his own colleagues and comrades-in-arms to his insatiable lust for revenge.

It has been clear that the never-changing list of “bad oligarchs,” provided to the Western media by the US-certified “anti-corruption crusader” Alexei Navalny, is produced with the same motives as Bershidsky’s initiatives: personal antipathy, and the desire to improve the situation of competing “good oligarchs.”

The idiocy of the Treasury Department’s bill is an indicator not just of the US government’s own inadequacy.

It also reveals the level of incompetence of the Russian liberal opposition, which the American side reportedly consults before imposing new sanctions. The Treasury Department’s list was after all a fruit of the joint labours of American bureaucrats and pro-Western Russian “activists.”

Yabloko supports the idea of personalized sanctions against the oligarchate, against the people who perceive Putin as a guarantor of stability.

Thus Emilia Slabunova, the chairwoman of the ultra liberal Yabloko party, as quoted by Nezavisimaya Gazeta in December last year.

Add to that some pure incompetence and laziness on the side of US officials, who confuse names and are generally uninterested in the inner workings of the countries they want to govern from outside.

For example, the list includes Oleg Budargin as the head of Russia’s “Rosseti” company, even though Budargin quit that position months ago.

The same is true about Kirill Shamalov, who sold his share in SIBUR company for an undisclosed amount of money, but who is still listed in the American report as SIBUR’s top person – which he was, but only until last August, when Mr. Trump signed the CATSA bill!

Indeed, the professionalism of the people who compiled the list is much more in question now than the future of the list’s members.

If there’s one thing everyone in today’s Washington can agree on, it’s that whenever an official or someone being paid by the government says something truly outrageous or dangerous, there should be consequences, if only a fleeting moment of media fury.

With one notable exception: Arguing that the US should be quietly working to promote the violent disintegration and carving up of the largest country on Earth.

Because so much of the discussion around US-Russian affairs is marked by hysteria and hyperbole, you are forgiven for assuming this is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn’t. Published in the Hill under the dispassionate title “Managing Russia’s dissolution,” author Janusz Bugajski makes the case that the West should not only seek to contain “Moscow’s imperial ambitions” but to actively seek the dismemberment of Russia as a whole.

Engagement, criticism and limited sanctions have simply reinforced Kremlin perceptions that the West is weak and predictable. To curtail Moscow’s neo-imperialism a new strategy is needed, one that nourishes Russia’s decline and manages the international consequences of its dissolution.

Like many contemporary cold warriors, Bugajski toggles back and forth between overhyping Russia’s might and its weaknesses, notably a lack of economic dynamism and a rise in ethnic and regional fragmentation.But his primary argument is unambiguous: That the West should actively stoke longstanding regional and ethnic tensions with the ultimate aim of a dissolution of the Russian Federation, which Bugajski dismisses as an “imperial construct.”

The rationale for dissolution should be logically framed: In order to survive, Russia needs a federal democracy and a robust economy; with no democratization on the horizon and economic conditions deteriorating, the federal structure will become increasingly ungovernable…

To manage the process of dissolution and lessen the likelihood of conflict that spills over state borders, the West needs to establish links with Russia’s diverse regions and promote their peaceful transition toward statehood.

Even more alarming is Bugajski’s argument that the goal should not be self-determination for breakaway Russian territories, but the annexing of these lands to other countries. “Some regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from whom Moscow has forcefully appropriated territories in the past.”

It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without sparking a series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version the US would directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800 Serbian nuclear warheads.

So who is Janusz Bugajski, and who is he speaking for?

The author bio on the Hill’s piece identifies him as a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. But CEPA is no ordinary talk shop: Instead of the usual foundations and well-heeled individuals, its financial backers seem to be mostly arms of the US government, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Mission to NATO, the US-government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, as well as as veritable who’s who of defense contractors, including Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Textron. Meanwhile, Bugajski chairs the South-Central Europe area studies program at the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State.

To put it in perspective, it is akin to a Russian with deep ties to the Kremlin and arms-makers arguing that the Kremlin needed to find ways to break up the United States and, if possible, have these breakaway regions absorbed by Mexico and Canada. (A scenario which alas is not as far-fetched as it might have been a few years ago; many thousands in California now openly talk of a “Calexit,” and many more in Mexico of a reconquista.)

Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine a quasi-official voice like Bugajski’s coming out in favor of a similar policy vis-a-vis China, which has its own restive regions, and which in geopolitical terms is no more or less of a threat to the US than Russia. One reason may be that China would consider an American call for secession by the Tibetans or Uyghurs to be a serious intrusion into their internal affairs, unlike Russia, which doesn’t appear to have noticed or been ruffled by Bugajski’s immodest proposal.

Indeed, just as the real scandal in Washington is what’s legal rather than illegal, the real outrage in this case is that few or none in DC finds Bugajski’s virtual declaration of war notable.

But it is. It is the sort of provocation that international incidents are made of, and if you are a US taxpayer, it is being made in your name, and it should be among your outrages of the month.

So said President Charles De Gaulle, who in 1966 ordered NATO to vacate its Paris headquarters and get out of France.

NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.

And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania as an attack on the United States.

The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.

Apparently, President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

The shock of our establishment that Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans suggests that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.

Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories. Some of us can yet recall its beginnings.

In 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city.

The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell, or was thrown, from a third-story window to his death. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb.

As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, the U.S. formed a new alliance to protect the crucial European powers — West Germany, France, Britain, Italy. Twelve nations agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on them all.

Cross the Elbe and you are at war with us, including the U.S. with its nuclear arsenal, Stalin was, in effect, told. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned to Europe to send the message that America was serious.

Crucial to the alliance was the Yalta line dividing Europe agreed to by Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the 1945 Crimean summit on the Black Sea.

U.S. presidents, even when monstrous outrages were committed in Soviet-occupied Europe, did not cross this line into the Soviet sphere.

Truman did not send armored units up the highway to Berlin. He launched an airlift to break the Berlin blockade. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian rebels in 1956. JFK confined his rage at the building of the Berlin Wall to the rhetorical: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

LBJ did nothing to help the Czechs when, before the Democratic convention in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact tank armies to crush the Prague Spring.

When the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa was crushed in Gdansk, Reagan sent copy and printing machines. At the Berlin Wall in 1988, he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Reagan never threatened to tear it down himself.

But beginning in 1989, the Wall was torn down, Germany was united, the Red Army went home, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the USSR broke apart into 15 nations, and Leninism expired in its birthplace.

As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that threat should be allowed to fade away, and a free and prosperous Europe should now provide for its own defense.

It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”

This, said Kennan, would “inflame the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations.” Kennan was proven right.

America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.

And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.

Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory.

Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions.

Our foreign policy establishment is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his mandate. And if he means to carry out his agenda, he had best get on with it.

Photos of new Iskander base near Ukrainian border creates media hype

Fox News obtained satellite photos that claim that Russia has recently installed new Iskander missile batteries, one of them “near” to the Ukrainian border. However, what the Fox article does not say is left for the reader to discover: that in regards to Ukraine, these missiles are probably not that significant, unless the missiles are much longer range than reported:

The intelligence report provided to Fox by Imagesat International showed the new deployment in Krasnodar, 270 miles from the Ukrainian border. In the images is visible what appears to be an Iskander compound, with a few bunkers and another compound of hangars. There is a second new installation that was discovered by satellite photos, but this one is much farther to the east, in the region relatively near to Ulan-Ude, a city relatively close to the Mongolian border.

Both Ukraine and Mongolia are nations that have good relations with the West, but Mongolia has good relations with both its immediate neighbors, Russia and China, and in fact participated with both countries in the massive Vostok-2018 military war-games earlier this year.

Fox News provided these photos of the Iskander emplacement near Krasnodar:

Fox annotated this photo in this way:

Near the launcher, there is a transloader vehicle which enables quick reloading of the missiles into the launcher. One of the bunker’s door is open, and another reloading vehicle is seen exiting from it.

[Fox:] The Iskander ballistic missile has a range up to 310 miles, and can carry both unconventional as well as nuclear warheads, putting most of America’s NATO allies at risk. The second deployment is near the border with Mongolia, in Ulan-Ude in Sothern Russia, where there are four launchers and another reloading vehicle.

[Fox:] Earlier this week, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said authorities of the former Soviet republic are being “controlled” by the West, warning it stands to lose its independence and identity as a consequence. “The continuation of such policy by the Kiev authorities can contribute to the loss of Ukraine’s statehood,” Mr Patrushev told Rossiyskaya Gazeta, according to Russian news agency TASS.

This situation was placed by Fox in context with the Kerch Strait incident, in which three Ukrainian vessels and twenty-four crew and soldiers were fired upon by Russian coast guard ships as they manuevered in the Kerch Strait without permission from Russian authorities based in Crimea. There are many indications that this incident was a deliberate attempt on the part of Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko, to create a sensational incident, possibly to bolster his flagging re-election campaign. After the incident, the President blustered and set ten provinces in Ukraine under martial law for 30 days, insisting to the world, and especially to the United States, that Russia was “preparing to invade” his country.

Russia expressed no such sentiment in any way, but they are holding the soldiers until the end of January. However, on January 17th, a Moscow court extended the detention of eight of these captured Ukrainian sailors despite protests from Kyiv and Washington.

In addition to the tensions in Ukraine, the other significant point of disagreement between the Russian Federation and the US is the US’ plan to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Russia sees this treaty as extremely important, but the US point of view expressed by John Bolton, National Security Adviser, is that the treaty is useless because it does not include any other parties that have intermediate range nukes or the capability for them, such as Iran, North Korea, and China. This is an unsolved problem, and it is possible that the moves of the Iskander batteries is a subtle warning from the Russians that they really would rather the US stay in the treaty.

Discussions on this matter at public levels between the Russian government and the US have been very difficult because of the fierce anti-Russia and anti-Trump campaigns in the media and political establishments of the United States. President Putin and President Trump have both expressed the desire to meet, but complications like the Kerch Strait Incident conveniently arise, and have repeatedly disrupted the attempts for these two leaders to meet.

Where Fox News appears to get it wrong shows in a few places:

First, the known range for Iskander missiles maxes at about 310 miles. The placement of the battery near Krasnodar is 270 miles from the eastern Ukrainian border, but the eastern part of Ukraine is Russian-friendly and two provinces, Donetsk and Lugansk, are breakaway provinces acting as independent republics. The battery appears to be no threat to Kyiv or to that part of Ukraine which is aligned with the West. Although the missiles could reach into US ally Georgia, Krasnodar is 376 miles from Tbilisi, and so again it seems that there is no significant target for these missiles. (This is assuming the location given is accurate.)

Second, the location shown in the photo is (44,47,29.440N at 39,13,04.754E). The date on the “Krasnodar” photo is January 17, 2019. However, a photo of the region taken July 24, 2018 reveals a different layout. It takes a moment or two to study this, but there is not much of an exact match here:

It may be true that Russia deployed weapons to this base area in Crimea, but this is now Russian territory. S-400s can be used offensively, but their primary purpose is defensive. Troops on the Crimean Peninsula, especially at this location far to the north of the area, are not in a position strategically to invade Kherson Oblast (a pushback would probably corner such forces on the Crimean peninsula with nowhere to go except the Black Sea). However, this does look like a possible defense installation should Ukraine’s forces try to invade or bomb Crimea.

Fox has this wrong, but it is no great surprise, because the American stance about Ukraine and Russia is similar – Russia can do no right, and Ukraine can do no wrong. Fox News is not monolithic on this point of view, of course, with anchors and journalists such as Tucker Carlson, who seem willing to acknowledge the US propaganda about the region. However, there are a lot of hawks as well. While photos in the articles about the S-400s and the Russian troops are accurately located, it does appear that the one about Iskanders is not, and that the folks behind this original article are guessing that the photos will not be questioned. After all, no one in the US knows where anything is in Russia and Ukraine, anyway, right?

That there is an issue here is likely. But is it appears that there is strong evidence that it is opposite what Fox reported here, it leaves much to be questioned.